


That First Face

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Mentions of Necrophilia, Other, Sanitarium Island, botched surgery, drugging someone and stealing her face, headcanon explanations, references to the extended universe/twitter accounts, there's also a corpse parade, when people are monstrous but don't know it yet, ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 23:51:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4806935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Pavi Largo first realized he wanted to change his face, he almost mistook the stinging, hungry need of it for love.  It was her, after all, and it was almost more about what she was than anything – what she was, and what he could be, too, if he only climbed behind her face and smiled through her perfect temptress’ lips.  </p><p>(This is a guess as to why Pavi was stealing that face in the incriminating picture Rotti is given at the beginning of the film.  Pavi's own face isn't scarred yet, I noticed, so this is kind of my first theory.  Of many.  I've been WONDERING.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	That First Face

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! 
> 
> To give credit where credit is due, I reference what TVTropes told me were the official Twitter accounts of the three Largo siblings in this story. I read them all almost immediately after seeing the movie.... this means: @luigilargo, @Pavi_Largo and @officialmssweet. These Twitters informed me that Luigi attempted to drown Pavi as a kid, and that Pavi's mom disappeared when he was young. They also told me he likes making fruity drinks for EXTREMELY QUESTIONABLE PURPOSES that I didn't write about (I only have him make one to steal a face, because how could THAT possibly be questionable???), used to stutter and enjoys cupcakes. TVTropes also told me this info has never been denied as canon, so when imagining ~Pavi's history~ I tried to incorporate some of this extended universe canon. I hope this is okay!
> 
> I also mention "The Phantom of the Opera," which isn't even a little mine. It was written by Gaston Leroux. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy the story! I'm a bit nervous about posting it. If I got anything wrong, please let me know!

When Pavi Largo first realized he wanted to change his face, he almost mistook the stinging, hungry need of it for love.  It was _her,_ after all, and it was almost more about what she was than anything – what she was, and what he could be, too, if he only climbed behind her face and smiled through her perfect temptress’ lips.  Those lips smiled at him sometimes, and it wasn’t long before he realized that when she laughed so did he, _so did everyone_ , and when she pouted he wanted to spin her off to better things even more than he wanted her to open up her legs for him.  It could have been love, perhaps, the way he watched her eyes shift behind her dream-dark lashes, the way he waited for the playful arch of an eyebrow when she spoke.  It could have been love, but when he found himself slicing apart the edges of that face and sliding his hands behind it, behind her and into her, grasping through dripping muscle and intimate heat, he knew it had to be something else. 

Part of him was angry that he’d broken her, left her crooked in an alley where she had been so bright before.  Part of him was thinking, _Yes, yes, and they’ll attach my new face where this old one used to be.   Beautiful.  Yes, I like that._  

Pavi’s face will woo them all, you see.  If not his own face, known and expected and too often ignored, then _this_ face.  This face that belonged to a laughing, beloved girl, a girl who was hardly ever mocked when she spoke, who had never gasped through friendly bubble-bath water as her brother held her thrashing child-self down beneath the waves.  One minute Pavi had been playing with a gleaming plastic pirate ship and the next he had been burning all through, burning and choking and watching that ship bob comically as if in a make-believe storm.  If his dad hadn’t shown up –

The soap had stung down Pavi’s throat for ages back then, and it had left him heaving sick – he hadn’t even been able to scream his hurt out properly.  His stutter had caught the words and drowned them in rainbow-slick bubbles, too, so he couldn’t tell Luigi off or explain to his dad how scared he’d been.  Rotti had known.  He’d provided a towel and a hard, impassable stare, and Pavi had leaned against him like someone stranded and freezing might lean into the heat of a fire.

Rotti said, “Fight back next time, Paviche.  You understand?”

That meant there would be a next time, and Pavi sobbed so his still-fresh and un-trademarked bones rattled.  He squeezed his fingers into red, sticky eyes and said he would try.  He wasn’t sure how, mind you – he was spindly and small compared to his brother back then.  He asked, “Where’s my mom?” through stutters and the rasp drinking bubble-bath water in desperate, dying gulps had left behind.  It wasn’t the first time he’d asked this question, though it would be the last.  His mother would have held him, he felt sure, and she would have worried over the way he was still shaking, the way his unmodified pores were still able to prickle into gooseflesh.  She had been gone for a while, by that point, but he was positive she’d find time to come back for something like this.  Maybe she would mind that her son, her favorite boy, her only little baby, had to wear foundation over fingerprint stains on his throat when he appeared in public the next day. 

Pavi’s mother couldn’t come back, though he didn’t know why at the time, and later he wished he hadn’t found out.  Back then he was free to wonder, free to beam and wave next to Luigi at the press conference.  Despite himself – despite the way his throat stung, despite the way he purposefully kept from brushing his brother’s arm in the car – he felt something like relief when Luigi nudged all the microphones away, stealing questions and glances and leaving Pavi to memorize everyone’s shoes.  Luigi was sure he’d inherit GeneCo, after all, and reporters seemed to think it was charming to jot down what a bright-eyed little kid had to say about his future cutthroat regime.  It was easier for Pavi not to talk, sometimes, before he developed his new soaring, wheedling voice, the voice that got people giggling and waiting for him to finish what he was trying to say.  The accent was a tool, at first, but it was also a person – a step towards the person Pavi wanted to be.    

He didn’t always soak his thoughts in that new voice, not at first.  By the time Pavi decided he wanted to change his face, though, he was dreaming as his new self, as the self with GENterns hanging off his arms and fondling his dick in blood-slick organ storage rooms.  The self that smirked on magazine covers and slid in front of his brother sometimes to kiss a pretty reporter’s hand.  It was a step, it was a step, but sometimes he still wasn’t enough. 

This girl.  It was about her.  It wasn’t just that he wanted to slip under a knife like his sister did, building up his own features into something more and more and more.   Hadn’t he tried that, here and there?  His veins thrummed with rare brand name blood, sometimes, and he convinced himself it felt smoother, felt different, and sometimes his skin twisted tighter, supple and new in a surGEN’s hands.  But then, you see, it was still his very own.  It wasn’t what he needed at all.  Any old doctor could have modified Pavi’s face, and he could have smiled back at a coy and freshly sewn-up stranger, just a groggy afternoon with Zydrate sparking along whatever muscles the doctors decided not to switch out.

But this girl had slipped her arm into Pavi’s and he’d watched her, thinking maybe he loved her.  He certainly loved the soft, porcelain curve of her cheeks, loved the delicate dip of her chin.  Perhaps he wanted to be with her.  Perhaps he wanted to be her.  Perhaps he wanted to be able to make people feel like he felt when he was around her – to keep them cupped in his hand, sloppy, eager puddles of human lust, ready to want him, ready to be his. 

It could be he imagined his own words would be sweeter through her lips, and behind the delicate membrane of her eyelids the world would look better than it ever could for him.

He hated what she was and what he wasn’t, just as he loved it and never wanted it to end.

The drink he’d made for her was sweet and fizzed just a little, like the fluttering in your stomach on a first date.  Like he’d felt asking her to slip on something fit for a nice restaurant.  Like he felt watching her knees buckle, watching her ankle twist beneath her.  _At least that won’t hurt her, as she won’t be standing up again,_ he thought.  Of course he didn’t want to imagine her in pain – this wouldn’t hurt.  Nothing he was going to do to get that face would _hurt_ her. Back then, Pavi still felt that meant something. 

Pavi remembered the careless way she wrinkled her nose when she made jokes, as if she didn’t understand the value of her face.  He remembered the way she chewed at the edge of her lip as she read the menu deliberating between pasta and lemon-drowned fish.  He wondered if he would be able to feel the bits of chewed-up lip once he was wearing her face, or if the doctors would fix her up completely before they finished switching their skins. 

It was a thrill to think about tasting her lips the way she tasted them.  When Pavi imagined speaking through her face, he heard his voice as it should be.  As it had always been in his head – “I’m scared,” “You hurt me, _and you’ll never hurt me again.”_ It was clear, and it was sensual when it needed to be, and it was always decisive.  It was more _his_ than anything had ever been his before. 

Pavi kissed the girl’s forehead before he made that first cut.  He’d thought he was alone, and his hands were shaking.  It didn’t occur to him at the time that there was still a chance, now, to carry her inside, carry her to bed and leave a note with scribbled kisses on her nightstand.  “You passed out on the way home, bella.  Remind me not to give you anything so strong again!”  Something like that wasn’t set to occur to Pavi for years, and he wouldn’t know what to make of the thought by the time it decided to drop by.  It would probably be too late for him, by then.

Pavi had thought he was alone.  If he had realized his father would be handed a photograph of that moment preserved forever, that moment with him caught hunched over the girl in her going-out clothes, scowling over his shoulder at a light and a stranger, he might have thought to cover his own face.  As it was, this was the last photograph taken of him before his defining surgery, before he lost his first face forever.  Before he lost this beautiful new face, too, with all its possibilities.

The fuck ups happened suddenly, they told him, like falling dominoes after a gentle tap, though of course the fuck ups would change everything Pavi knew.  He wasn’t even awake to watch things go to hell, though he wouldn’t be able to sleep properly for weeks afterward.  He’d brought her face to the surgery room nice and fresh, tucked lovingly in one of the doctor-bags he’d swiped from the Repo Men.   It was a secret place for a secret feat, for a surgery that would leave him with her exact face made his forever, his and fading seamlessly into his neck, into his ears.  He would be Paviche Largo, but he would be someone else as well.  A better Paviche Largo, a Paviche Largo who had exactly what _she_ had.

Of course, that wasn’t to be.  When Pavi woke, his face was a wound, twisted into something raw and leering, without even his own soft lips and familiar trimmed brows.  The doctor handed him a mirror and then flinched back, as if he were dealing with Luigi, as if Pavi might rip a knife from under his hospital gown and carve up everyone else’s faces to match his new one.  He didn’t do anything like that.  He held the mirror in two cold hands and studied himself.  He couldn’t breathe for a moment.  It was, he thought, as if his face had been removed and then sewn back on in clumps, patchwork and fractured like tectonic plates on an angry world erupting with split vessels and blood.  It was uncooked meat.  It was every anti-surgery defamation poster his father had torn down off the street with a huff and a snarl. 

Pavi was sick over the side of the bed, sick without pain.  It was the thought of Luigi’s voice that did it – “Hot off the meat truck!” – and thoughts of his own face bubbling on a grill.  Raw meat.  Raw meat and stringy skin that would catch between your teeth.

His mouth was stretched all wrong for puking, strings of muscle torn so there was a hole in his cheek.  He had never imagined vomit coming out the side of his face before, and without the blur of Zydrate he would have been howling.  They came with mops and he cried, forgetting that anyone was watching him, forgetting that his hospital gown was stained with his own sick.  People moved in and out of the room, and surely _someone_ had found the girl’s body crumpled where Pavi had left it.   He wondered if he should have brought her a blanket for her dying moments, and his stomach rolled as he thought about her faceless head lolling back into slime and rat shit.  He was nearly sick again the moment he thought of how his non-face looked kind of like her non-face now, didn’t it?

Some might have called it karma, but Pavi didn’t think of that exact word until later.  It was hard to think at all, in fact.  He cried and ignored his father’s incoming calls, ignored calls from his lawyers, from his sister.   He ignored calls from a GENtern, too, a GENtern onto whose breast he had scribbled his personal number just before pressing her back into a glass case full of hearts suspended in freezing water, hearts pumping, pumping away in the dark.  The hearts in that box had shivered every time Pavi thrust, and the GENtern moaned into his hair, into his cheek, into –

Pavi cried because it would have been easier if this ruined warning poster of a face was a stranger’s, but these were still his eyes.  His tears traced strange new patterns in the fresh gore, but they tasted just as sharp and familiar as ever. 

“The facial tissue was dead when you brought it to us, Mr. Largo,” someone ventured, after a time.  “We thought we could modify her blood type to match yours, but it was too late – your body rejected…  This piece of her… Like a disease.”

Pavi nodded, and said, “Can you fix it?”  He said this in his old voice, so it came out stumbling and raw.  He swallowed and tried again, with his new, beloved voice: “Can you fix it?”

“There isn’t much to work with –” a nurse with streaked-pink hair started.

“Of course, Mr. Largo,” a doctor cut in.  “That will be another one-hundred fifty grand, sir, if you would please…”

Pavi reached for the silver vine-wound wallet that should have been strapped under his waistcoat, close to his heart – nothing but his own heartbeat there, now, and that was sluggish from the Zydrate.  He was wearing a pale grey hospital gown still, wasn’t he, splattered with bile and blood.  Pavi smiled without thinking, and the doctor took a half-step back.  His smile, Pavi realized, must have been horrible. 

There was a reason he’d gotten people to call him “Pavi” in the press instead of by his full name – he’d rather be loved, rather be a familiar face than a bloody prince like Luigi, hissing threats down at all the “peasants.”  What sort of life would it be, now, not to be called by an affectionate nickname anymore, not to have smiles greeted with smiles?  That’s _exactly_ what Pavi had been looking for, wasn’t it – a new reason to duck away from the cameras, a new reason to let Luigi rail on about how he’d butcher anyone who misquoted him or brought him the wrong kind of eggs in the morning, someday soon when _he_ was king.  As if he didn’t do those things already.  Pavi still locked the bathroom door in his own home when he showered.  Sometimes he even locked it when he slept, if he didn’t have beautiful company around.   If he remembered, of course – if he wasn’t passed out drunk on the way to his bed… 

“Don’t have my wallet,” Pavi supplied, and the doctor relaxed.  How had he read Pavi’s expression, then?  Something like fury, this new, traitorous face warping love into hate.  Pavi went for something sing-song, but his voice came out panicked, strangled:  “Silly me.”

“You should probably come back tomorrow, Mr. Largo,” one of the nurses murmured.  It was nice that she thought she could give him advice.  Meant she wasn’t afraid, yet.  Pavi nodded to her, careful not to smile. 

“Would you get my clothes, please?” he whispered. 

She hurried away.  Perhaps she was a _little_ afraid.

“Our errors were most regrettable, sir,” the doctor said.  “Please keep that in mind when you get back home.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Pavi said.  He was suddenly exhausted.  “I wouldn’t kill you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Yes, sir,” said the doctor.  He looked like he might faint, or maybe that was Pavi’s own dizziness talking.  Pavi asked him for bandages, and bandages were provided, lathered on thick like a second skin – he asked for a nondescript, plain coat, and that was brought for him as well.  It was the doctor’s own coat, he would learn later.  And wouldn’t that make him feel all the more like everyone’s darling? 

That’s what he’d say further along, of course, but at the time he was learning more about the power of fear, Luigi’s power, and how he might use it for his very own.  No.  He didn’t want anything like this.  He didn’t want to be anything like this. 

Perhaps he felt sorry.  He felt regret, certainly, and pain, the kind of dull, welling-up slow pain that meant his Zydrate dosage was wearing thin.  Maybe he’d take more.  Probably not.  Pavi liked his heart _racing_ , not swaying in a hollow glow.  He and Amber had different ways of feeling real.

Speaking of Amber, it seemed most of Pavi’s missed calls were from her.  That sharp-voiced little sister called “Carmela” once, who liked to play pretend, play teacher, play that she was a hundred thousand different people all in a day.  And Pavi had babysat her sometimes, once upon a time.  He remembered being led by the hand, being dressed up and ordered to read books with the tap of a toy wand on the top of his head.  He had been the safer option to leave little Carmela with, at least before he started sneaking off to feel the hot, wet mysteries underneath the GENterns’ dresses. 

Early, very early in his little sister’s life, Pavi had told her to get a servant to lock the door when she took baths, when she slept.  So far as he knew, Amber Sweet had never been without a chance to breathe.

For an insane, shameful moment, Pavi considered calling up a helicopter and leaving Sanitarium Island somewhere behind him for a while.  He considered disappearing into the smoky dark so he wouldn’t have to know how Amber –Carmela? – Amber would look at this new face, at this new smile that wasn’t a smile anymore.  He adjusted the collar of this new stranger’s coat and stared at the lights shifting in the sky, at his own face grinning down impishly from clouds like smudges of smeary ink.  An advertisement, his own neon-self more him than he was, right then, more him than he might ever be again.  “WIN A SURGERY FOR 2 WITH GENECO’S MOST ELEGIBLE BACHELOR.”

Hah.   

Pavi could never leave Sanitarium Island.  He could never leave his father, no matter what Rotti had to say about his son’s Phantom of the Opera impression.   He could never leave, because then he would be nothing, wouldn’t he?  And he’d have nothing.  He wouldn’t even have his face, anymore, or his lips for soft, persuasive kisses.  His father’s fortune had paid for every scrap of clothing he had on – even the silken socks still clinging with yesterday’s sweat.  His father’s fortune had even paid for the surgery that left him scared to face his own family, and it would pay for any attempt to put himself back together again.

Pavi called Amber Sweet, and she picked up the call right away. 

She spoke quickly, messily, and Pavi could imagine the spittle bright like clear glass beads stuck to her lip gloss.

“Where the fuck _are_ you?  You vanished off the face of the fucking earth, brother!” 

“I made a mistake.”

“Dad’s had people looking for you all night!”

“I’m at a clinic…”  Pavi glanced around for the hospital’s name, again – how had he found this place?  His head was swimming and his mouth tasted sour all through.  He couldn’t remember.  A whisper of a whisper, way back when, of a clinic willing to do dirty jobs quickly, a clinic that hadn’t managed to get all cozy with any of the news organizations.  Pavi had wanted to wear his new face for a surprise at his father’s gala a week from then.  He had imagined the magazine covers; he had imagined his own modest head-tilts and smiles when the compliments started pouring in.  “Not one of the better-known ones.  They were told _– I told them_ not to let on that I was here.”  And then, because he felt like he should, like he had to say something to make her soften her voice – “I’m sorry, sister.  I scared you, yes?”

“Of course you scared me.”

Pavi wrapped his arm around himself and closed his eyes, finishing the conversation in as measured a voice as he could manage.  It had been about that girl, about her and how people seemed to feel for her, but now it was about him.  It was about his face like a scab, like one scar that was a thousand scars.  It was about the smooth black car that came out of the smog for him with guards inside.  At first he thought it was just guards come to bring him back to the stark glow of the GeneCo Tower, but then Amber and Luigi climbed out as well.  Amber’s hair was platinum silk, and Luigi was a human thunderstorm.  The bloody prince was on a rampage.

“Brother, _don’t_ ,” Pavi said, but his voice was weak.  He could never let it get so weak with Luigi again, he knew.  His brother just leered and waggled his eyebrows, flipping his knife so it caught the sickly streetlight glow.  Then he went inside, and Pavi knew he would slaughter anyone he found, gutting them with a short bright knife so he could be sure to feel their wet heat staining his skin all the way up his arm.  Their wet heat, their ragged breathing – it was the same as how Pavi had learned to reach under dresses, maybe, except that it always seemed like a blend of disgust and heaven for Luigi.   

Ah, memories.

Amber touched Pavi’s bandages, and she shook her head.  Against all odds, she was smiling.

“I’m bad – _this is bad_ ,” Pavi whispered.  He couldn’t find it in himself to use his theatrical voice, just then.  Maybe he didn’t want those words to be associated with the Pavi Largo that everyone was supposed to love.

“It’s usually me,” said Amber, and she was almost tender, then.

Pavi laughed, and a raw hurt ripped through his face.  He gagged, and Amber wrapped an arm around his back.  He thought it was for a hug, to keep him close and keep him standing, but then she pressed a Zydrate gun to the back of his neck gently, very gently.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” she hissed, and pressed the trigger.  Pavi felt the world blur away completely, losing its edges and reasons and letting his bones go soft.  Amber led him stumbling into his father’s car, and she buckled his seatbelt like he was one of the dolls she’d recently raffled off for charity.  He rubbed his hand up her arm, sloppy and dazed, and said something about her new skin being very pretty.  She barked a laugh that sounded too, too far away.

“We’ve got Paviche,” one of the guards said into a communicator.  “We’re bringing him in now.”

Pavi leaned his bandaged forehead against the window and watched colors blend where the world outside was supposed to be.  He wasn’t used to taking so much Zydrate so quickly.  He learned later that his face smeared gore through the bandage, leaving streaks of scab and ruined meat all down the glass.  He also learned that Luigi said it was like pasta sauce and Amber snickered and then kicked him with a high heeled boot.

Rotti sent Pavi to his own personal surgeons on a stretcher, and his face was better the next day.  At least it wasn’t dripping anymore.  Someone handed Pavi his own intricately carved silver hand mirror, and he smiled until he could almost recognize himself – almost, almost, and that itself was terrifying.  At least he could tell when he was smiling.  Luigi laughed and said it looked like Pavi’d been run over a few times.  Amber said that _this_ was why you only went to properly advertised surgeons with reporters hovering around.  They were sure to give more of a shit about their craft with everyone watching, you know?  And what could Pavi have been trying to hide?

They would all find out soon enough. 

Pavi didn’t say a thing, for the moment, but he did giggle, strangled, and he did sigh and murmur something about the best faces to wear, the best people to be.  He hardly heard himself.  He was watching his face move in the silver hand mirror, watching the way expressions twisted this new painful meat enough to make even Luigi wince.  This wouldn’t do.  This _couldn’t last_.       

When Pavi was well enough to ride the glowing elevator down GeneCo Tower, he had a plan – he had the beginnings of the “Replace Your Face” campaign already forming on the tip of his tongue.  He called the GENtern who had worn his personal number scribbled across her boobs and asked her to bring him the prettiest repossession victims before they left the Repo Men’s workrooms.

She asked if he had something kinky in mind.

Pavi said, “No, no.  Treat their faces gently, though, bella, just as if I did.  I want the _beautiful_ dead!”

Some of his favorite GENterns stifled gasps and shudders when they saw him without his bandages, poised waiting for them in a surgery chair.  It couldn’t have been worse than the way his father had looked at him, though, looked at wounds like bad test scores, like another corpse Luigi left twitching on the floor.  Pavi explained that he’d like to wear the most beautiful corpse’s face grafted to his skin like a mask.    

“Just make sure my face won’t fall off until I’m ready, you know,” he laughed, and they laughed with him.  GENterns were good for that, for pressing up tight against him and laughing when he needed an echo.

“And when the face begins to… Go bad, Mr. Largo?” One of the women murmured.  “We can only preserve dead flesh so completely, sealed to someone so _alive_.  We wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

“We wouldn’t,” another GENtern crooned, her hand curling over Pavi’s shoulder, warm and secure and – dare he think it? – loving, even now.  Part of him knew she might have loved the paychecks more than anything, loved the benefits Rotti gave her for being assigned to one of his children.  Part of him had always known that, but in this moment it didn’t matter as much as it could have.  Her touch was still comforting, and her warm breath against his ear was still enough to stir him up, to twist his lip.

  It was still nice to know that someone would always be around to hold him, to fiddle playfully with the twin silver hoops in his ear, to trace the edges of his tattoos…  Mostly, though, to hold him.

Pavi licked his lips and winced at the taste of his insides.  “Then I’ll find another one, even more beautiful than the last,” he said. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say before he said it, but surely his _greatest face_ couldn’t have belonged to a dead girl in an alley, right?  Even if he could have loved her.  Her face had been found when he wasn’t even looking, sliced off and then wasted in a single thoughtless breath.  His greatest face couldn’t have been shredded beneath a scalpel.

His greatest face was yet to come, yes –it was waiting for some grand occasion.  In the meantime, Pavi would present delicate cheek after cheek, hollowed eyeholes still lined carefully in dark paint or stitched with gems as if for a festival.  Hers wasn’t the only beautiful skin, wasn’t the only perfect brow or nose or beckoning lip.  Sometimes Pavi would have to paint his faces in concealer as if they were living, to hide blemishes that, for a time, became his own – sometimes he would have to spritz himself with thicker clouds of stinging green perfume to hide the approach of decay.  Amber teased that the smell of formaldehyde never left him completely, and Pavi took to carrying a crystal vial of cologne in his sleeve.   Cologne, breath freshener, sprays to keep his hair glossy and the clasps binding his new faces sweetly to his skull from bleeding.

Now, before then, before Pavi learned how to shower with a second face, learned what it was like to laugh through a stranger’s lips, GENterns paraded limp corpses all around him.  He sat with his hands fluttering playfully near what had once been his cheeks, what he was now trying to think of like a blank canvas on which to present his best, most dashing self.  The evening’s models were new-dead and quickly bandaged, stinking of hasty attempts at preservation.  They were fresh, sure, but Pavi would soon learn that he preferred them fresher. 

Sometimes Pavi asked his GENterns to style the dead ladies’ faces – “Show me her frown,” or “Would you come running, if she winked at you?”

He could be a darling again, now couldn’t he, his lips still kissable and soft even if they’d first belonged to a dead girl. 

In time, Pavi would have to pull up outdated propaganda pictures of himself to remember the curve of his old eyebrows.  He painted so many new ones for himself before each face grew sticky and crumbling and began to catch flies – he designed his face, made his brows pointed or laughing or soft as a doll’s.    He wore so many faces it was sometimes hard to remember which one he had on at any given time.  He had to make sure his expressions matched the face, of course, and in time it would become like matching a shirt and socks.

Sometimes Pavi thought without thinking – without realizing? – that he was taking these new faces’ beauty into himself, making it part of himself.  Sometimes he thought without thinking that the next face would be better, that something would _click_ when he only got the next face and he would realize himself complete. 

It might have been love that lost Pavi his first skin and won him his masks – maybe.  Whatever the case, he tested the new face with lust, the same way Amber might break in a new body with someone else’s thrusts and sways and hunger. 

If the GENtern minded Pavi’s hands now any more than she ever had, if she minded his dizzy-eyed smiles now that they were stretching at new skin, she didn’t say a goddamn thing.  She gripped the edges of the operating table and moaned so sweetly and so wild that Pavi might have thought, “It worked,” if he thought anything at all.  He caught himself glancing at his reflection in the gleam of the table, first once and then too often, and he imagined his face dripping, and he imagined the beautiful new face hanging down limp and laughable as he moaned without lips, as his bare muscles twitched where they shouldn’t have been seen. 

It was a relief to see this new painted face every time he looked – like a kiss to this false cheek, like a reassurance that everything would be okay again.  Like a cupcake frosted by his mother waiting on the table when he’d thought she’d disappeared for good.  Like a warm, half-soggy towel on the edge of a slick tub after he’d thought he was going to drown. 

Pavi decided he would go to his father’s fundraising gala the next day, and he would bring the delicately engraved silver mirror to match his delicately painted new face.  It was important to make sure he kept himself together, after all.    


End file.
